As we approach December, I turn my eyes now to the New Year. January 1st as the start of a new year is no doubt an artificial construct, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. A new beginning is an opportunity to redefine ourselves, our habits, and our relationship to the world. Next year, my resolutions are all going to be project-based. I want to commit to myself to make progress on reifying ideas that are meaningful to me. We all have ideas, but if you’re anything like me you may struggle to muster the agency required to bring any of them to fruition. Making a commitment, either to yourself (private journal) or the world (blog post), in writing seems to kickstart the high agency process of actually doing stuff.
So allow me to put it in writing. These goals will far short of SMART goals, but, by starting to define them in November, I will have plenty of time to crystalize them into in actionable plans by January. These are the projects I want to progress significantly next year:
- Roko’s Library (I own the domain but nothing is up there for now)
- Holy War TCG
- zymazza.com and Zy Mazza the V-Tuber
- Eden’s Gate
If you’ll indulge me, allow me to tell you about them! I think one or more of them might appeal to you. I hope they do because I’m making some of them for consumption!
Roko’s Library
Roko’s Library is meant to be a game engine and platform for publishing games. Specifically, one of my favorite (albeit niche) genres: text-based RPGs. I think a lot of people, especially creatives, have anxiety about AI replacing them and taking away their livelihoods. I don’t think this is unreasonable at all, but I also don’t think it’s inevitable. I want Roko’s Library to be a resource authors can use to rapidly prototype story ideas, see how the public interact with them, and hopefully market them into a book, movie, or tv show deal.
Roko’s Library allows an author to define a general plot, a cast of characters, a setting, and lore for a story. The AI game engine takes over from there, generating a playable RPG based on that story that the author can share with their friends or the general public. For now in testing I’m using Chat GPT generated stories and loose ripoffs from the 1001 Arabian Nights, but in the near future, I hope to solicit my first unique story from Niccolo Giambanco, the mind behind Arizona Gothic. He has agreed to write a story for me, but due to failures on my part, the project has stalled. In 2024 I hope to reinvigorate that.
The V1 interface of Roko’s Library is a simple terminal-like interface where the user can type their actions in the world on the bottom, and the story gets printed out on the top. Unlike AI dungeon, and other products on the market, Roko’s Library has a few interesting advantages. The first is Roko, the AI guide that is consistent from game to game and facilitates a meta narrative of my own making about the world of Roko’s Library, apart from the stories users publish as games. Roko is designed to keep track of important parameters in the game, and can serve as an interactive walk-thru if you want him to–but he is carefully designed not to spoil the plot!
The second advantage is the gameplay itself. In the popular AI storyteller games currently on the market, you, the game player, have to specify the context of each input. Usually your options are something like:
- See (describe what you’re seeing in the story)
- Say (say something, usually to a character or a crowd I guess)
- Do (self explanatory)
- Sometimes “Story” (progress the plot basically)
Usually you have a drop-down menu or some shit like that, and you have to go and select the appropriate option before you put in your input. Along the same lines, these games are highly dependent on the player to inject context, plot items, and generally keep the story alive. Using a lightweight model of my own design, I can actually classify ANY user input on the fly into one of 23 (and counting) to route the input to an appropriate model or prompt to handle that action. There are a lot of specialized modules for geography (a big known limitation of games in this space), combat, persuasion, regular speech, supporting user-defined skill and magic systems, characters, inventory management, and more. The games are very fun and playable with very simple inputs (“I go north”), and the games rely more on inputs from the authors than the players.
In fact, unlike other games in the space, it is actually quite resistant to the player trying to bypass or ignore the story. Eventually, though not in V1, it will support NSFW content for the fan fiction crowd. By V5 or so we should have pictures and maybe even an optional graphical interface. Who knows! One of the earlier features I want to add is the ability to customize the color palette of the terminal interface.
If you have any interest in making your own text-based RPG, please reach out to me! I’d be happy to give you early access to everything and work with you to define the game-creation interface! Right now, I’ve only really done work on the gameplay interface itself, so I know that’s work I’ll have to do as I progress this project.
Holy War TCG
I regret to inform you, if you haven’t gathered already, that I’m a fuckin’ nerd. Like many who suffer from my condition, I have been known to play some Magic: The Gathering throughout my life. Unfortunately, due to the fortnitification of the gaming space, it’s becoming quite lame. It’s only a matter of time before they’ll have a Planeswalker called “Rick Sanchez.” I also don’t like how overtly demonic the game is.
One night, bemoaning this state of affairs with my brother and some friends while we played, we came up with the idea for Holy War. It’s a trading-card-game based entirely on scriptures and lore from Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. It might get a little controversial, but our goal is only to print cards related to something that someone, somewhere, at sometime actually believed. In that sense perhaps it could be quite educational. Instead of tapping lands for mana, you’ll tap houses of worship for devotion. Card types will be something along the lines of:
- Creations (Human, Animal, Plant, Angelic, Demonic, Non-Human)
- Artifacts
- Relics
- Miracles
- Blessings/Curses
Generally stuff like that. Right now we’re working on workshopping card ideas, and hopefully putting together a formal rule set and a couple of decks we can test with. One of my good friends is working on his own stable diffusion model (create your own means of production!) that we can use to generate our own cards. It’s still in pretty early stages:
I think eventually the ideal would be to have real artists like Wizards of the Coast, but for now for the sake of rapid prototyping, we will lean on AI (sorry visual artists, but I still love you!).
zymazza.com and Zy Mazza the V-Tuber
Well, you’re looking at zymazza.com right now! But as you can see, it’s an underdeveloped template shithole for now. This site is about exploring my definition of digital sovereignty, producing my own propaganda about my own worldview to counter state and corporate propaganda that surrounds us, and, of course, shilling my products and side businesses like I’ve been doing this whole article.
The V-Tuber aspect is connected to the site, but it will also exist on different platforms. Ultimately, that’s meant to be a vehicle for me to explore my philosophy of transhumanism (broadly reject it!), and to drive the propaganda machine I want to build. I’m in the very early stages of the V-Tuber journey and I don’t plan to produce any content until next year. I’m currently in the process of commissioning what visual artists I could find on twitter in my price range. So far this is my favorite concept that’s emerging:
Could this be Zy? I want her to be modest but cute, and I’m going for a Winry kinda mechanic vibe. I might also make her into an elf. One of the key pieces of content I hope to produce next year will be capturing the total solar eclipse from the air in my airplane, as my V-Tuber character. If that’s the only piece of content I produce all year, I will be happy, as long as I get it right and it comports to my vision. Realistically, to achieve that shot, I’ll need to get plenty of practice making content before then. That means that in the three months between January and April, I need to make a lot of content. It will probably be bad. It will be the content of a beginner after all, so please be patient with me.
Eden’s Gate
Eden’s Gate is the hypothetical name of my hypothetical paradise on Earth I aim to build. I will not build it next year, but I do hope to identify a suitable location to build it, and take steps to preparing to purchase land in that location. That may mean acquiring citizenship somewhere, beginning an immigration process, or simply moving to someplace I am already a citizen of. I don’t know yet. Basically, Eden’s Gate is meant to be a techno-permaculture agricultural operation with a dash of high-end amenities. Ideally a runway (or close proximity to one), an ice rink, sauna, mews for my future birds of prey, and other assorted bips and bops to make into a place I will rarely, if ever, leave. If I’m not living in 40% complete Eden’s Gate within the next five years, I will be upset.
To make the 10 year plan happen, I need to focus on achieving that 5 year goal, and to achieve the 5 year goal, I need to take concrete steps next year. Another big goal is going to be raising and saving the required sum to purchase Eden’s land. This is no easy feat, and I doubt any of the projects I listed above will mature enough by the end of next year to make a dent in that goal. But, as I said in my first post, with a goal in mind like this, I can re-contextualize the drudgery of my day-job into noble progress towards self-actualization.
Thanks for Reading!
Hopefully some of this stuff sounds appealing to you. I’m doing this stuff either way, but it sure would be nice if someone somewhere appreciated what I’m working on. I also hope I can encourage you to work on some cool stuff too, and I hope you’ll share it with me and the rest of the world! Let’s all build the future together!